OXYPHENBUTAZONE: As many members of ALOTT5MA on Facebook already know, the WSJ reports today on the awesomeness and popularity of the Scrabulous application. But, um, Matt?

Legal experts say there are risks to Scrabulous, however. Copyright laws allow someone to freely use an idea, "but not copy the expression of the idea," says Anthony Falzone, head of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University. He says the Scrabulous board looks strikingly similar to the Scrabble board, with light blue and pink squares in the same spots denoting double- and triple-word scores. The names might also be too much alike, says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor.

Hasbro Inc., which owns the U.S. rights for Scrabble, says it doesn't comment on legal matters. Rajat Agarwalla says he emailed Hasbro several weeks ago to notify the company about Scrabulous. Hasbro has not responded, he says. The brothers say they consider Scrabulous to be essentially an online version of Scrabble. "It's not really different," Jayant says.

NO LOVE FOR THE TREMENDOUS UPSIDE OF CORBIN BLEU? Via Carrie, Moviefone lists the hottest 25 actors at or under the age of 25.

LIFE IMITATES ART IMITATES LOHAN: Samaire Armstrong, who plays party girl Juliet Darling on Dirty Sexy Money, is going to miss an episode while she's "deal[ing] with some personal issues in a therapeutic atmosphere." I'm continuing to enjoy DSM, though I'm hoping that (like Brothers and Sisters last year) we wrap up the "big mystery" ("What's William's Secret?," "Who Killed Nick's Daddy?") early and get on to the good stuff (drunken Walkers/Darlings on parade!).

NEXT, GEORGE CLOONEY PERFORMS A BEND AND SNAP: Given the heavily legally minded audience of this blog, figure we need a thread for discussion of two big lawyer-related pop culture events this weekend--Michael Clayton at movie theatres nationwide (which, aside from a somewhat bizarre "Michael bonds with horses" scene, is almost perfect, and Tilda Swinton should be a Supporting Actress frontrunner for her authentically scary performance), and Legally Blonde: The Musical, which is just finishing up on MTV now, and which repeats tomorrow evening. Compare and contrast here.

FRIDAY NIGHT SPONSORS RAP UNEMBARRASSINGLY: I watch a lot of girly TV -- Gossip Girl, Real World/Road Rules Challenge, the occasional Patriots game -- so I'm used to tuning out a lot of dewy, dreamlike commercials for feminine products. That's why this week I'm devoting my entire Friday Night Lights sponsorlove post to the feminine product Designed By Men For Men: Yaz birth control pills. Let's review:

• Prevents pregnancy;
  
• Won't cause your lady friend appearance-related mood-killing catastrophies, like unsightly acne or bloating;
  
• Won't induce moodiness or irritability that might get your lady friend "all up in your grill";
  
• According to the 92% of the ad devoted to disclaimers, only works if your lady friend keeps herself fit and disease-free, which is nice to know;
  
• Makes your lady friend entirely responsible for contraception, leaving you free to daydream about being Jack Bauer kicking Jack Bauer's ass kicking Jack Bauer's ass just so that you can teach him a valuable life lesson and then teaming up with him to foil the plots of the Irano-Franco-femino-terrorist cabal; and
  
• Named after a baseball player (although, frankly, you know how I feel both about left fielders and insufferable Red Sox fans, but I'll let it slide).

The only way this product could be more assured of winning the FHM Medicare Part D Product of the Year is if it required beer to activate and let you kill it in Halo to up your rankings. So ladies, if you don't have kidney, liver, or adrenal disease, you are not being treated for or at risk for cardiovascular or chronic inflamatory disease, you have other plans for preventing STDs and HIV, you're not afraid of a minor blood clot or heart attack, you're under 35, you do not smoke, and embrace persistent fatigue as a symptom of living life to its fullest, pop a Yaz and by all means sow those oats.

TOONS. GETS 'EM EVERY TIME: As noted below, Al Gore has built his global-warming campaign through a variety of pop-culture media, but in our discussion (which was more heated than usual precisely because of climate change, right?) we somehow missed a crucial venue for Gore's Nobel-worthy ideas: animated cartoons. Like pop-culture visionaries before him, Gore realized that your story can reach a much wider audience if you tell it with toons.

Filmmakers had experimented with animation off and on during the early 20th century, with Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo" (1911) and "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914) attracting the most popular and critical attention. By the 1920s, animated shorts had become part of the typical line-up at most movie theaters, and the decade's favorite cartoon character was Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat. Felix was a familiar type, a comic troublemaker full of energy and desires, but thanks to animation, he could break the rules of physics and biology at will, as seen in "Felix Dopes It Out" (1924) or the hallucinogenic "Felix Woos Whoopee" (1930). Felix's celebrity was reinforced through licensed merchandising, a clever money-making and brand-building concept that would become standard practice in animation.

By the late 1920s, though, Felix's pre-eminence was being challenged by a new cartoon critter: Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse. At first, Mickey wasn't all that different from Felix; in his sound-film debut, "Steamboat Willie" (1928), he's a rather rascally rodent, spending most of his time abusing animals in order to make them squeal "Turkey in the Straw." But Disney smartly followed the popular mood, and as Depression-era Americans turned away from Jazz-Age enthusiasm toward what Steven Watts calls a sentimental populism, Disney modified Mickey accordingly, making him more domesticated, more human, more childlike. In "The Band Concert" (1935), he's trying to fend off the mischievous pranks of Donald Duck -- pranks that Felix and Mickey 1.0 would have gleefully participated in. Heck, by the late 1930s, Mickey even owns a dog.

Mickey's evolution into a respectable citizen (along with Disney's growing focus on feature-length animation) left the field open for a new boisterous cartoon personality: Warner Bros.' Bugs Bunny. Beginning with 1940's "A Wild Hare", Bugs revived the frenetic, anarchic style of Felix and early Mickey, combining sight gags, wild chases, violence, and of course, cross-dressing; in 1942's "Fresh Hare" (1942), we even get an early-model Elmer Fudd and a bizarre blackface-minstrels finale. By the end of World War II and the classic "Baseball Bugs" (1946), the rabbit and the mouse were arguably animated equals.

I could wrap this lesson up with some profound question about the subversive qualities of animation, the ways in which cartoons allow artists to say things they couldn't say through live performance. But since it's the last class before fall break, I'll end with a much simpler query:

Mickey or Bugs. Who ya got?

Next week (no class on Monday): the studio system, Hollywood's Golden Age, and the movies in wartime.

MY MOM SAYS I LOOK LIKE A LION: My first response to this list of the Top 10 Hidden Performances (actors plying their craft from under a load of latex) was that Eric Stoltz was getting his comeuppance for conning his friend out of that Rube Walker baseball card.